• By Jason Bacot
• Published 10/28/2010
• Writing

One of the hardest things to do in your college years is to write an impressive research paper. Whether you like it or not, you have to invest your time and effort to this, as research paper writing has now become an essential part of an academic curriculum. Actually, many students are afraid of writing a paper because of the research work involved in its preparation. But, if you keep a few important things in mind, you can make the process of research paper writing less stressful for yourself. The first and foremost thing to understand is that you cannot write a correct paper unless you pay attention to what is being required by your instructor. In other words, you need to know more about the type of assignment you need written. Sometimes, it is simple to write an assignment, as you just need to collect some facts and statistics about a specific topic. This is exactly what you do when you write a simple High School report. On other occasions, you need to do an in-depth analysis of a specific topic. What it means is that you can proceed in the right direction only if you first know what is required to complete a research paper. Once you determine this first thing, you need to find a topic. This is probably the hardest part of research paper writing and many students make serious mistakes while selecting one.

In reality, the topic selection shouldn’t be extremely difficult actually. You

need to keep a few points in mind and you’ll end up getting a great topic. First, try to find a topic about something that you love to do or read. For instance, some students love to read about the latest happenings in the financial world and they can find an easy topic within this niche. Now, it also depends upon the course you are studying in college. Just try to select anything that feels interesting to you. As long as it is an interesting topic, you won’t need anything to stay motivated all the time. This will make your entire research process simple, straight-forward and easier. Once you are done selecting the best topic for research paper writing, your next step should be to find correct and valuable resources to collect related information. Again, this step is not simple, but the availability of the internet has made it a bit easier than ever. Still, it is a good idea to spend some time in a library to find some quality books related to the topic chosen.

If you are able to collect good information about your topic, the only thing you are left with is proper formatting. You need to use all the possible statistics and information available to you so that you can prove your point. With lots of information available, this won’t be extremely difficult for you. So, always keep in mind that research paper writing is not extremely difficult but it is definitely tricky, for sure. You need to proceed in a sensible way, for which you have to divide your paper into parts and handle one part at a time. That’s the way to go!